Google’s Real-Time Voice Translator Could Make Any Language Lingua Franca

The real-time-translating Babel Fish from Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy was named for the Tower of Babel, a biblical structure fractured by linguistic confusion.

Google engineers are working on a translator for Google Android smartphones to convert one language into another quickly enough to allow speakers without a common language to communicate with one another in near real time.

The comparison is still apt; and now, Adams’ vision of a plurality of languages communicating smoothly with one another is closer to reality. Google says it plans to release a basic version of its first real-time translation services in two years.

Google has its work cut out for it. Translation presents a tougher challenge than re-imagining e-mail or copying Microsoft Office as a cloud-based service. Humans are nuanced communicators — which is why, to date, the translators we’ve seen are basically elaborate gimmicks, limited by the size of their dictionaries and inability to parse phrases.

As usual, Google’s goal is loftier: to enable real-time translation of spoken meaning, rather than just words. To do this, the company is cobbling together its voice recognition, 52-language text translation, and text-to-speech technologies into a unified voice-to-voice translator. (Actually, the full path would be “voice-to-text-to-translation-to-voice.”)

“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, told Times Online. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”

Google has at least two tricks up its sleeve for improving the accuracy of its translation system: crawling web pages and documents in various languages to improve its artificial understanding of how each language works, and analyzing entire phrases before offering a translation, rather than just translating individual words.

“The future… looks very interesting,” added Och. “If you have a Babel Fish, the need to learn foreign languages is removed.”

Some speculated that globalization and the internet will spawn a global monoculture. But if real-time translation is real, and available on the average mobile phone, technology could also have the opposite effect: to preserve many of the world’s 6,000 or so spoken languages.